Smart media, such as smart cards, are being used in an increasingly wide variety of applications. One such application is the use of smart cards to provide payment and ticketing capability for mass transit users. Smart cards have found applications in many other areas including pay phones, health care, banking, identity and access, pay television, gaming, metering and vending. Retail businesses utilize smart cards to encourage return business or to gain points that are redeemable for cash or merchandise.
Smart cards generally include one or more smart chips or integrated circuits (“IC”) located within the body of the card or packaging to receive and store information or applications. The ICs can be read-only or have read/write capability. Reusable smart cards with read/write capability allow users to add time or value to payment-type smart cards, thus avoiding the inconvenience of having to carry currency, or, in the case of mass transit, exact change, for each usage. The smart card will also have an interface-mechanism, which will depend on whether the smart card is a contact-type or contactless smart card. Contactless cards will contain an antenna structure for communication with an RF source, and typically include circuitry adapted for deriving operating power from the RF signal.
The smart card is a small, usually credit card shaped, device that contains at least a memory device, typically an embedded integrated circuit, for storing information and applications and a transceiver to communicate with a smart card communication device. The smart card communicates through a transceiver on the smart card to access stored information. The smart card communication device may simply read the information, write information into the memory device or modify existing data in the memory device. For example, if the owner of a smart card uses a smart card containing financial information to make a purchase, the smart card communication device can read the information including the cardholder's identity and the availability of funds. The smart card communication device can also write a new volume to a smart card or deduct the purchase amount or token units from available funds. Further, the communication device can store transaction data on the smart card including the time and location of the transaction in addition to the identity of the communication device.
In the prior art, textual data, such as character and numerical data, is stored on smart media. Prior systems that utilize smart media do not have the ability to store a graphical image on the smart media with conditional data and display that graphical image to a display screen upon presentation to a card reader.